My mother is a witch

Chapter 4: Inheritance

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After the trapdoor sealed, silence fell.

The chains that had dragged Enoch into the earth burned into ash, scattering across the floor like black snow. My mother’s body lay beside me, her hand cold in mine, her lips still parted as if she might say something more.

But she wouldn’t. I knew that.

She was gone.

I stood slowly, knees trembling, blood still singing in my veins. The air stank of sulfur and charred wood. The symbols on the walls pulsed faintly, responding to me like old wounds reopened.

I stumbled to the mirror hanging near the corner of the room. I needed to see myself—needed to know what I’d become.

And there he was.

Not Enoch. Not my father.

Me.

But changed.

My eyes were no longer brown. They glowed with that same eerie amber as my mother’s once did. My veins shimmered beneath my skin like ink spilled under ice. My reflection rippled, for a moment showing something else—taller, leaner, older, with antlers growing from my skull and a grin stretched far too wide.

I recoiled, and the image snapped back to normal. Just a boy.

A boy with power.

I returned to the center of the room. The trapdoor was shut, but no longer chained. It throbbed with heat, like something breathing just beneath the wood.

I could feel him. Enoch. Not screaming. Not gone. Just waiting.

Inside me, a voice stirred.

“You opened the door, my son. It won’t close again.”

I dropped to my knees, clutching my skull. My thoughts weren’t safe anymore. He was there, coiled like a snake in the corners of my mind, patient and smiling.

“I gave you your gift. Power no witch could dream of. All I ask is that you stop pretending to be afraid of it.”

“No,” I muttered. “You’re not real. You’re sealed.”

“Not sealed. Sewn. Into you. Into your bones.”

I tried to resist him, tried to breathe, but I was suffocating in my own body.

Then—pain.

Agonizing, hot pain tore across my back. I screamed as if being split in two. Something inside me twisted, cracked, and bloomed. My skin rippled. My spine arched. I collapsed.

When I woke, the room was darker. Cold.

The mirror was broken.

My back ached as if wings had tried to tear free. My fingernails had grown black and sharp. And my voice—when I finally spoke—wasn’t just mine anymore. It echoed.

Something had awakened.

I staggered upstairs, each step echoing louder than it should. The cottage was untouched, just as it always was. As if the horror below had never happened.

But the rocking chair still moved.

I sat on it. It creaked under me like it remembered her weight.

I realized then I couldn’t stay. The villagers already feared my mother. If they found out what I was—what I had become—they’d burn this place down. With or without me in it.

So I made the only choice I could.

I buried her in the woods behind the house. No cross. No name. Just a circle of stones and the cloves she used to hang by the windows. I carved one word into the earth.

"Mother."

That night, I packed a satchel with her grimoire, the blackened dagger, and a jar of soil from beneath the trapdoor.

Before I left, I turned back one last time.

And whispered to the house:

“I am your heir now.”

The wind answered. The door closed behind me.

But I could still feel him—beneath the floor, beneath me—whispering, always:

“We’re not finished.”

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